Linux Foundation Collaboration Meeting 2008

This was nice!

Three days of meetings at the J.J.Pickle Research Center of IBM at Austin, Texas USA.
A lot of groups of the Linux ecosystem met, some kernel guys, desktop guys, Linux printing folks, power management interested and also a complete track of Linux on mobile devices.

With almost every meeting and presentation mobile Linux was at least mentioned once. This is quite amazing!

Today, on the last day, we had a whole day "Gnome Mobile" meeting lead by Dave Neary. Quite some people were in the room from various projects and, it was a Linux Foundation event, a lot of companies.

The buttomline of all mobile realted meetings was that the iPhone has set new standards for mobile device GUIs and that supposedly all "customers" of Gnome mobile are asking for something at least similar and very close - well, I do not buy that. The other recent development that seems to scare a lot of people is OHA, the Google phone approach. Reason they are fearing it is that it provides a one shot approach - take OHA and you are almost ready to go into production. Well, I do not buy that either.

The good news is that actual work is starting off to make Gnome Mobile a product. There were good talks going on about what the brand could mean, how it can be assigned and under which circumstances. A quite lengthy list of components was defined with parts that will go into an initial release and parts that shall be addressed later.

A quite important good news for me is that parts of GPE Phone Edition might make their way into Gnome Mobile - it will be later but it looks very likely. I had some very good talks with Dave Neary and Rob Taylor about that. Being part of Gnome will greatly help GPE Phone Edition.

So stay tuned! Things are accelerating and moving into a good direction ;)

Cheers!